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Delta outage causes delays at BWI-Marshall

Hundreds of Delta Air Lines flights were canceled Monday after a power outage caused a worldwide ground stop. The outage caused long lines at Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshal Airport. Delta said some sort of power outage at the airline's hub in Atlanta overnight shut down its computer system worldwide, grounding flights for hours and disrupting travel for tens of thousands of people.

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Delta said some sort of power outage at the airline's hub in Atlanta overnight shut down its computer system worldwide, grounding flights for hours and disrupting travel for tens of thousands of people.

"This nice lady came up to me and said, 'Are you flying Delta?' And I said, 'Yes.' And she said, 'No, you're not.' She said, 'Their computers are down.' And I said, 'Oh great,'" Gail Beveridge said.

Siraj Boudijhr said he had a strange experience when he tried to check in for his flight.

"It printed out a next-day flight for me in the early morning," he said.

By 8:40 a.m., the system came back online, some Delta flights got off the ground and the ticket counter lines calmed down, but the residual mishaps continued.

"We were in line for a flight that just departed that was supposed to fly at 9 a.m. but departed at 11:10. They had seats on it, but they told us they could not put us on it. They couldn't delay it anymore," said Lila Ogiba, who was trying to get to Cancun. "To be honest, I'm just praying everybody's safe today if they get on a plane."

Delta said it may take days for its computer database to fully recover, so the airline is waiving change fees for ticketed travelers through Friday. If travelers re-book their flight after Friday, they may pay the difference for a new fare.

"When two things like that happen back to back, your hair kind of goes up on your arms, and your spidey sense starts, and you think, 'Maybe this is somebody testing our systems, some attacker.' It's kind of scary," said Bill Sieglein, who is a cybersecurity expert with CISO Executive Network and a former National Security Agency and Central Intelligence Agency employee.

So far, Delta has not said whether it had been hacked, only that it's investigating what happened.